Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

The sad thing is that Sierra Nevada is in some ways doing more to help drop the cost of going into orbit than almost anybody else around. The Dream Chaser [wikipedia.org] spacecraft is really an amazing vehicle that is just beginning to reach a point of getting a payoff, which the early flight trials going on.

If they get cut, I hope that the investors in Sierra Nevada (and apparently Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic fame is one of them) continue to press forward without NASA funding.

They really don't deserve to be cut, at least so far as the investment being made by NASA into this company will likely produce some impressive long-term results. It is mainly sad that a jerk of a congressman who doesn't like these programs (COTS and CCDev) instead wants to dump 10x the amount of money on a fiscal black hole that will never fly (namely the SLS... aka the "Senate Launch System").

This move to reduce the options for CCDev is not going to save much money, and in fact it will set back commercial spaceflight by several years if not a full decade.

What is your logic here? You think it costs signifcantly less to turn Dream Chaser around than a Dragon Capsule? It looks an awful lot like a Space Shuttle to me for that.The two who seem to be doing a lot for bringing the price down would be Blue Origin (who are banking on a seemingly unlikely SSTO), and SpaceX with their Resuable Powered Decent stages (which also seem pretty far away at this point). It takes a 130 million Atlas V to put a Dream Chaser into orbit last time I looked, where as the Dragon only needs a 60 million dollar Falcon 9. Although Dream Chaser *could* probably fit on a Falcon 9 and in either case you are looking at additional costs on top of the basic launcher.

IMHO, "looks like the space shuttle" is a pretty flimsy excuse. The Space Shuttle was a victim of two things: massive budget cuts in the development program, and being a first-generation reusable -- aka, it should have been seen as a testbed for learning rather than a workhorse. This craft seems to have the major lessons learned from the shuttle program down - top mount (lower vibrational load, no debris impacts, etc), single-piece TPS to save on maintenance, much smaller vehicle (the smaller the craft, t

The Space Shuttle was a victim of two things: massive budget cuts in the development program, and being a first-generation reusable

In other words, NASA badly overspent on a first generation reusable. If the Space Shuttle had been able to carry a couple of people and a little payload, it'd have fit quite nicely into NASA's existing ( and for the foreseeable future) budget. Instead, they built the successor to the Saturn V. It sucked the oxygen out of the room for any other large space projects that didn't involve the Shuttle and contributed to its survival in some way.

It was too ambitious. It wasn't overbudgeted for what they were trying to accomplish (and after the budget cuts, it was way underbudget for what they were trying to accomplish). They were, however, trying to accomplish too much, and especially for a first-gen.

I think the Space Shuttle was just a big flop that only escaped being cancelled because the US Government has such deep pockets. In the end, in fact way before the end, it was a jobs program more than anything else. It set the space program back something like 20-30 years.I don't understand why people can't just admit it was a horrible mistake. Actually, of course I do understand, so many valuable lifetimes of work were sunk into it.We have to pretend.... But we should have just been building cheaper rockets (which the two other programs on the table proposed) - or funding a Ramjet, or Roton, or almost anything else. The only really useful thing the Shuttle did was repair Hubble.

Imagine where we would be now if NASA had done something like COTS 20 years ago after Challenger blew up instead of building another Shuttle.

I don't think it's that clear cut. As I mentioned before, the problems were overambition and budget cuts during the development process that made everything worse.

The overambition is actually quite understandable. Think of what we had gone from, at the start of the 1960s to the Apollo moon landings. This incredible pace of accomplishment was driving people's sci-fi dreams of the future wild, even people in high places. The notion was that, clearly, we're about to become a spacefaring race in a major way, we need a vehicle to haul people and tons of cargo with a rapid launch rate turnaround; that's where the inception of the concept came from. Of course, that was not to happen, and not only due to the fault of the shuttle program.

If the overambition itself wouldn't have doomed the goal of affordable reusable spaceflight, the budget cuts in development (brought about in no small part due to the Vietnam War) certainly did. The sacrifices made in development to accommodate them pretty much ensured that it would not be a reliable, affordable system. Turning to the air force for funding meant adding crossrange capability and even greater cargo capability. Disastrous. The lower level of funding meant less system reuse and higher maintenance on the systems that were to be reused. For example, the early shuttle designs called for a titanium frame which could run hot, instead of the current (cheaper) aluminum frame which can't. Letting the frame get hotter means you can use a simpler, and thus easier to maintain, TPS. Not to mention safer; the Columbia disaster couldn't have happened and there wouldn't be nearly as much metal fatigue concerns.

Again, hindsight is always 20-20, but it's easy to see how the problems came about from overambition and then huge budget cuts in development. And I don't think calling it a jobs program, at least initially, is totally fair. Unlike Ares, which is "let's use as much shuttle hardware as we can to keep the plants open and keep developing it even when there's no longer a niche for it", the Shuttle wasn't heavily based on Saturn hardware. Now, what I think clearly became a jobs program and takes no hindsight to see is that when the Shuttle program went down the tubes, and it clearly had failed at its nominal goal of affordable reusable spaceflight, of not only keeping it running but keeping it as the workhorse of the US spaceflight fleet.

I don't think it's that clear cut. As I mentioned before, the problems were overambition and budget cuts during the development process that made everything worse.

The problem with your interpretation is that: a) The budget cuts were well known from about 1968. The design should have been scaled down from the start. It's worth remembering that NASA had a large budget for only a few years. I think it was very foolish to assume that NASA would get 2% or more of the federal government for the indefinite future.

b) NASA even after budget cutbacks still outspent every other space program on the planet and has done so for about four decades.

it doesnt exist yet. it hasnt flown, and its still more expensive per pound than the dragon, which has flown twice and is cheaper per pound. so if you could illuminate how the dreamchaser is doing more than spacex in dropping the cost of going to orbit for all of us, were all ears.

I think theres a very good chance that the one of the four that gets completely cut could easily end up getting bought out by one of the others in order to get access to some of the developed technology.

Specifically, I'd look for Boeing to buy the odd company out in this situation. Yes, that means I think there's no chance Boeing would be the odd company out.

Of these four companies, the only one I could possibly see being "bought out" is Sierra Nevada. They have other projects going right now and while the Commercial Crew is a wonderful bonus and useful for the development of their company, they aren't necessarily dependent upon just this one contract in order to continue to exist as a company.

There is no bloody way upon this green Earth that either Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is going to

Richard Branson's involvement is to use the Dream Chaser as the orbital spaceflight vehicle for Virgin Galactic. He is investing "seed money" and essentially offering a hard purchasing contract for the vehicles once they are built. That may not translate into actual stock ownership of the company, but it does make him an investor after a fashion and somebody important to consider in terms of company finances.

There are other people involved, and what is now known as the Dream Chaser has a fairly interestin

Robert Bigelow seems to have the money and the will to go into space on his own dime, and apparently even has the customers needed to make his space enterprises profitable. Enough that he even went through a significant planet expansion, even if he had to lay off a bunch of his employees temporarily.

The main problem that Robert Bigelow has been facing is trying to get people into space, and he has been insisting that he must have at least two different launch providers using completely different sets of en

While that does present a conflict of interests, there is a big double-bind - namely, that these companies are doing development projects that are generally too large and risky for even large private companies to be comfortable gambling on by themselves; for smaller companies, the concept is right out. It'd be hard to get any serious bids at all without helping with development. So yes, what you mentioned is a serious critique, it's not without reason that NASA does development contracts. And it's a cash

There is what, a 99.9999999999999% chance that Boeing is selected, and will promptly game the setup to gobble most of the cash. They will provide extremely well-written reports as to why they need more cash in order to deliver the results that are requested.

There is what, a 99.9999999999999% chance that Boeing is selected, and will promptly game the setup to gobble most of the cash. They will provide extremely well-written reports as to why they need more cash in order to deliver the results that are requested.

NASA has been steadily losing government funds since the Apollo program ended. I think the lucritiveness of government funding for commercial spaceflight is probably a myth. I have a feeling the government subsidies are going to be token payments and tax breaks, not amounting to much more than a negligible portion of the total budget for any individual spaceflight endeavor. The rest of the budget will have to come from investors, who no doubt turn around and pass the savings on to the customers.

This is really frightening. Many of the existing large contractors such as Boeing and those for the Space Shuttle are those who are largely to blame for the huge costs of American space technology that has really threatened the US space industry and its ability to compete with the Russians and the French/ESA.

People often blame NASA for the mess that was the shuttle, which was a very expensive launch vehicle to operate. The shuttle should have been abandoned years before and replaced with better technology,

PS: it Rep. Shelby of Alabama (R) who wanted to lock in SLS funding, represents the district in Alabama where the SLS is built, so it was pure pork barrel. It was in fact Obama and Democrats who stopped the SLS lock in and continued work on the CCP, because the SLS was primed to turn into another white elephant.

The launch technology should be based on science and technocracy rather than based on the good old boys networks of Republican politicians who are given kickbacks by corporations.

We've got a good long list of bullshit warplanes that just don't work right, to the tune of billions of dollars. But hey, at least we've got handfuls of those futuristic-looking planes, even if they can't fly combat missions.

Orion is not meant for ISS operations. Orion is meant for Beyond Earth Orbit: asteroid and lunar exploration, that sort of thing.

That isn't what NASA was saying back when the Ares I was still under active development. The Ares I was being designed specifically so the Orion capsule could get to the ISS (complete with an ISS mating adapter) that really makes it a direct competitor to the SpaceX Dragon, at least for manned spacecraft.

Orion really does a lousy job for areas beyond LEO though. While it has just under 2x the usable internal volume that the Apollo spacecraft used, that won't exactly be something to brag about. Perhaps reasonable for a trip to the Moon, but I don't see how it will possibly be used on a trip to an asteroid much less Mars. The "habitable volume" of the Orion is very much comparable to the internal volume of the Dragon. I just don't see how astronauts are going to be expected to hang out in that kind of volume for weeks and months.

What makes the Orion useful for beyond LEO is mainly that it has its own solar energy generator array, and that the heat shield is being designed to perform re-entry of a free-return trajectory from the Moon and a similar return flight coming from Mars. Then again the Dragon capsule is being designed with those same parameters as well.

Orion might be a piece of the puzzle in terms of getting to Mars or somewhere else in the Solar System, but by itself it won't get the job done.

Yes, Orion was, back in the Ares-1 days envisioned as going to the ISS. However, that was only meant as a stop-gap, a temporary solution until Commercial Crew came online. Back in those days, the plan was to fly the shuttles to 2015 as well.

Unfortunately, as built, Ares-1 could not even put Orion into orbit, and it's big brother, Ares-V, would have been prohibitively expensive to build and launch (and further, wasn't meant to take crew). One was overkill, and the other, anemic.

The commercial crew program wasn't even a part of the planning under Constellation. To suggest it was a "stop gap" is completely misrepresenting how it was sold to Congress. Commercial crew has been perceived as the "stop gap" until Constellation could be built, as a sort of "insurance program" if there might have been problems. In fact, in congressional testimony and other public discussion about the future of manned spaceflight, it was almost as if the commercial crew didn't even exist as a program wit

One can always chain capsules to make larger volumes. But I must admit that it'd probably make much more sense to attach the capsule to some sort of inflatable habitat, such as Bigelow's proposed BA 330 (which would have over 35 times the interior volume of an Orion capsule).

It was sort of sad though, at a recent "press day" at KSC prior to the launch of the Falcon 9 there were several NASA public relations guys that were hyping up the Orion capsule and the SLS as the "deep space" alternative to the Dragon capsule, and waxing on and on about how Orion was the "solution" to deep space travel and that the Dragon would only be used for trips to places like the ISS.

The original Orion concept -- and it get serious attention, even today -- was for an enormous, massive parabolic dome with a spacecraft on top of it. The spacecraft injects small nuclear bombs into the dome, and they explode at the focus. It's pretty much guaranteed that thing will MOVE! And yes, it is quite feasible and technically possible.

I don't think anybody is seriously considering building one of those right now, but the name stuck, and Orion has now been known to generations as "the nuclear bomb powered spacecraft".

Kind of a negative name to pick for your newfangled, modern, but chemical-powered machine.

I don't know about the name being negative, I was quite disappointed to learn the "new Orion" was chemical powered. Hardly seems fair to give a glorified orbital space-taxi the name that once belonged to a design that would have put the the entire solar system at our feet. Sort of like resurrecting the retired jersey number of a football superstar only to give it to the water-boy.

Of course the "old Orion" could never have been used as a launch vehicle or even in near orbit without serious ecological and E

Yes, there are certainly very strict limitations on its normal use. But on the other hand, if a big sacrifice (of a rather large area) were really necessary, technically there is nothing preventing it from being single-stage-to-orbit... and far beyond.

Read "Lucifer's Hammer" by Niven and Pournelle. (And maybe you already have.) But the Orion concept has been around far longer than their book. They borrowed it, they didn't invent it.

"They could have at least saved the name until building a high-thrust ion drive vehicle with similar potential."

It's a different concept. An ion drive of any size could probably not power such a beast off the Earth, for the simple reason that ion drives rely on low mass at extremely high velocity to power their acceleration. But that velocity is necessarily limited by the currently known laws of physics. It probably would not be sufficient for escape velocity by itself.

But agreed. Ion thrusters are, today, designed for extremely efficient thrust / mass ratio, but only over time. If that same efficiency could be br

In contrast, Orion (the old-school Orion concept) gives you the output of a couple of billion of them, in a few microseconds. Nobody said it was efficient, but if nobody's using the key you can always use the sledgehammer.

An ion drive of any size could probably not power such a beast off the Earth

Very true, but the getting off Earth part isn't really that interesting, we can do it already and it's *really* not something you would have wanted to use a nuke-drive for anyway, unless you have to do so very quickly before the space-elephants drop a kinetic weapon on you (loved Lucifer's Hammer, a battered old copy still holds it's place in my personal library)

For getting around the solar system though - if a state of the art ion drive is 1000x too weak to do what you want, strap 1000 drives to your hull

Not quite -it's simpler if you don't think of (non-specific) impulse in terms of energy, but rather momentum. Let me use a battery as a metaphor: A rechargeable AA battery contains about 3Watt-hours of energy, and you can extract that energy at whatever rate you want, within the physical constraints of the battery. 3W for 1h, 1W for 3h, or any other combination so long as #Watts * #hours = 3Wh. Similarly a rocket's fuel tank contains a certain amount of impulse, say 100Ns (for an itty-bitty rocket). Yo

BTW, contrary to much of contemporary thinking, getting off the earth is VERY interesting and is in fact probably the single most central issue.

The gravity well is the single largest obstacle to complete conquest of local space. As long as missions continue to be launched from Earth, they will continue to be unnecessarily expensive. By a factor of 10 to 100 at least.

Put industrial plants on the moon (a completely feasible, if expensive, concept today) and you divide those costs by many times.

I'd say getting off the Earth is more challenging than interesting, some of the potential solutions are interesting, but the task itself not so much. A fuel-mining moonbase is probably a big part of the answer because it's not actually terribly difficult and manages to sidestep a large part of the challenge. An Earth-based railgun that extends out of the atmosphere could be another part of the solution, but that's a *massive* engineering project with some almost completely untested technology. In the lon

The other "selectee" will be Alliant Techsystems with the Liberty rocket. Yes, I realize they didn't even make the cut from eight or so to four, but they are going to drive everybody else out simply through a massive lobbying effort that will change the outcomes of several districts.

ATK has their fairy god-senators looking out for them and a very effective public relations team which knows how to do some serious lobbying.

I'm sure the hope is more for ATK and Boeing to get this contract and cut SpaceX out completely. Then again ATK was betting that last week's Dragon flight would blow up on the launch pad or otherwise go dead. SpaceX is hard to ignore at the moment, but that is sort of the point why this whole down select is real stupid.

They will be a major contestant for the down select, regardless of what else you think about them.

Hard to beleive SpaceX would not be one of them at this point. In fact I think it is fair to say that Musk would drive the man rating of Dragon forward regardless of whether or not they get it, and that could potentially make the CCP program completely idiotic - i.e. if they went for something else and it cratered budget-wise, as space programs traditionally do.Still, I am not convinced that a good deal of SpaceX's success is somehow begininers luck that could fade as the org grows and they take on too many

ATK is currently a part of the CCDev program.... they are just "unfunded". Tweaking the language of the appropriations bill to get them included in the selection criteria would be trivial and would only take a couple steak dinners at a posh DC restaurant with the right congressional staff members... and I don't think the guys at NASA who are running the program would complain.

ATK having a chance? I would put them as one of the top contender not necessarily for their technical expertise (although they have

Yes, I'm suggesting that if ATK somehow is excluded from the process of being involved with flying crews to the ISS, that they will change the inclusion parameters so they will become included even if it opens the process up to other competitors. They have some very powerful friends in Congress (both in the House and the Senate) including some very long time supporters who will go to bat for them. The language of the SLS, to give an example, was written explicitly to include ATK components in the legal de

Boeing is bigger and probably not too agile, but how can they lose after a 50 year head start? They were on the Gemeni program FFS. They make the Delta rocket. Isn't this just a matter of tweaking the terms of the their NASA contracts?

From what I understand, a few demos of their launch abort systems, and they should be shiney. The crewed Dragon and the cargo Dragon are the same pressure hull, and share the same liftoff and on orbit flight characteristics. So every cargo flight will be a test flight for the crewed vehicle.

While that's all more or less true, there's one detail missing: they're still building the launch abort system. I think Musk said they'll begin testing later this year, but he doesn't expect to be flying people for 2 or 3 years yet. Anyway, I agree that SpaceX will definitely continue the manned Dragon development, with or without help from NASA. Given the number of F9/FH flights they've already sold, they should have plenty of money to do the work.

In Capitalist West exSoviets dock with you:)
The US has found some new "Germans" to help them with the complex space thing.
US entrepreneurs are going to rebrand expensive US and Russian gov tech to new dot com heights.

There should be at least a couple, perhaps similar, but with different specialties. Maybe Dragon is better to LEO with heavy cargo or to HEO, and someone else's solution works better for smaller satellites, etc.

Boeing will get the nod of course. It's Boeing. It's been in the space funded corporate leech business for decades. I hate to say it, but I'm thinking ATX will get the nod as well, with SpaceX the third partially funded guy. ATX is another corporation much beloved by Congress for its bribe money^F^Fcampaign contributions.

Nah, the troughers have to kick SpaceX out because they're the only company who have proven that they can do the job and do it cheaper than the competition. That cannot be allowed.

The purpose of this down select is explicitly to hurt SpaceX and to drive them out of the market place through political maneuvering. If you claim it cannot be allowed, you really need to contact your member of congress and complain about this whole notion of a down select.

That Representative Frank Wolf, the guy behind this move to force the "down select", may have major egg on his face when these other commercial spaceflight developers have much cheaper vehicles than the things being built by Boeing and A

Gwynne Shotwell certainly is selling vehicles. They just sold some to Bigelow Aerospace. If you send an email to gwynne at spacex dot com, I'm sure she will even quote a price for you if you are being serious about buying those vehicles. They will also provide launch services, but if you want to buy the vehicle and fly it yourself, that won't really be too much of a problem for them.

BTW, SpaceX doesn't sell launch services even on a cost-plus basis, and the Liberty vehicle is also being developed indepen

SLS is the camel in the tent here. I think there is a subtle, partial neutering of this program and its competitors going on here. For example,

U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, the Virginia Republican who heads the House appropriation subcommittee with NASA oversight, said today that the program would fully fund two companies â" and could partially fund a third.

Thatâ(TM)s down from as many as four companies, according to Wolf.

âoeThis downselect will reduce taxpayer exposure by concentrating funds on those participants who are most likely to be chosen to eventually provide service to ISS,â he said in a statement.

IMHO, that's doublespeak for "I was able to take out two of four potential competitors to my favorite space pork, the Space Launch System [wikipedia.org]."

The deal also would lay the groundwork for NASA to impose stiffer regulations on the companies competing to develop the rockets and capsules â" a priority for Wolf â" while giving NASA more leeway to nix contracts if it thinks aspiring companies are overselling their capability and financial health.

In other words, a series of irrelevant obstacles can be thrown in the way to hinder these companies even more. The "stiffer regulations" simply isn't needed. NASA already is almost pathologically paranoid about what gets near the ISS. But it's a great tool for adding cost to these activities. We'll see how that gets abused in the future.

Similarly, more leeway to nix contracts means greater uncertainty (and resulting weaker financial health) for the contractors. NASA already is a problem child for bad contracts due to its considerable ability to renegotiate contracts, Darth Vader style [adultswim.com]. Being allowed even more excuses to renege on contracts will cause even more problems for these contractors.

This isn't going to kill the COTS program, but we should remember that some people are trying to. I think in part this is to remove competition for the SLS and in part just a ploy to eventually suborn COTS funding for the SLS.

NASA already is almost pathologically paranoid about what gets near the ISS.

If you 'owned' an irreplaceable multi billion dollar asset - and would get scorched by your bosses and atomized by the public if it got so much as scratched... you'd be pathologically paranoid too. And that's on top of the issue of astronaut safety.

"NASA already is almost pathologically paranoid about what gets near the ISS."

As much as I agree with much of what you say, it is perfectly understandable that NASA is extremely cautious about the ISS. It's their ONLY manned program right now, and it's not even really "theirs"!

Of course, as we well know, bureaucratic stagnation and bungling are behind that very situation, and NASA has been ordered by 2 different Presidents to clean up that act... which they still haven't done.

What the private space program does NOT need is more regulation or interference from NASA. We KNOW this. Look what SpaceX and Virgin and others have accomplished without it.

NASA already is almost pathologically paranoid about what gets near the ISS.
They have that Austrian feeling as a foreign architect takes way too many pics. Somewhere in the heavens, they are building.

The downselect is a fundamental part of how we (being the government) competitively select the prime for large projects.

Why "downselect", that is, rule out viable competition at this time? They're getting good outcome for the money. I think my explanation fits the bill. So that the primes for the eventual SLS contracts don't have real competition from the COTS competitors.

Would you rather have any larger defense corporation have no competition this early?

So the choice is "downselect" or "no competition". Do you realize how dumb that false dilemma is? Congress could have also fully funded COTS and its selection of four competitors as NASA requested. But instead they downselected. Again, I have an explanation

... the Democratic administration wants to encourage free market competition, and the Republicans in Congress want to limit it. This should not be a shock to anyone who pays attention to reality rather than party rhetoric.

the Democratic administration wants to encourage free market competition, and the Republicans in Congress want to limit it.

And Republicans are supposed to be for lower taxes. Meanwhile, Ken Davlin, the Democrat who was Mayor here before he shot himself, didn't raise taxes once. Mike Houstin, the current Republican Mayor, raised electric rates (the city owns the power plant) last year, and raised property yaxes this year.

I wonder why nobody seems to notice that the Tea Party didn't seem to mind Bush taking u

It appears that the old model was for NASA to pay contractors to develop national assets, whereas the new model is for NASA to pay contractors to develop contractor-owned assets?

.

Also, I think we are bound for a cold-water-in-the-face moment of realization that the privatization of space launch means it is now divorced from nationalism/patriotism for the first time. It is no longer "we" or "us" or "our" space program. A private company can re-incorporate elsewhere to save on taxes or avoid regulations

I think NASA showed that they hadn't a clue what they should do with their terribly expensively developed "National Assets". They are all now rusting hulks. And they are developing another one with no clue as to what it is for (jobs for retiring engineers maybe).At least the commercial guys are likely to rack their brains out as to how they can get more money out of "their" assets.And face it - if a war broke out and SpaceX had useful assets, who do you think would control them overnight?

A private company can re-incorporate elsewhere to save on taxes or avoid regulations in a heartbeat.

Wrong. Quoting a representative posting on the SpaceX careers page:

"To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State."

What you are forgetting here is that this particular program, the commercial crew development program (commonly called simply CCDev) is not being operated like a traditional government contract in the fashion that the Manhattan Project of the 1940's was run (and how most major engineering projects have been paid for since).

When the Manhattan project was under development, the bureaucrats realized that they were asking companies to literally come up with stuff that nobody knew if it could be done at all much

Blue Origin and their SSTO nonsense should have never received a dime of public money to begin with.

So you think the DC-X program [wikipedia.org] was a terrible waste of tax dollars? Why are you upset that a private company without tax dollars is furthering the research into that flight concept and propulsion system?

Furthermore, do you even have a clue what part of the CCDev program that Blue Origin is even doing, what their spacecraft actually is supposed to look like, or how it is going to get into orbit much less return to the Earth? If you did, you wouldn't have made such a stupid statement presuming something that wasn't even true.

*Hint* -- Blue Origin proposed to use the Lockheed-Martin Atlas V for the launch of its spacecraft under CCDev. They aren't even planning on flying their own hardware for the first stage or two.

Blue Origin and their SSTO nonsense should have never received a dime of public money to begin with.

So you think the DC-X program [wikipedia.org] was a terrible waste of tax dollars? Why are you upset that a private company without tax dollars is furthering the research into that flight concept and propulsion system?

Furthermore, do you even have a clue what part of the CCDev program that Blue Origin is even doing, what their spacecraft actually is supposed to look like, or how it is going to get into orbit much less return to the Earth? If you did, you wouldn't have made such a stupid statement presuming something that wasn't even true.

*Hint* -- Blue Origin proposed to use the Lockheed-Martin Atlas V for the launch of its spacecraft under CCDev. They aren't even planning on flying their own hardware for the first stage or two.

Without tax payer dollars, from the beginning, Boeing, United Airlines, McDonnell Douglass, Lockheed Martin, etc., never exists. These ``leave it to private enterprise'' stalwarts seem to ignore history. Really big ideas require national support. Unless you have a company with the funding like Apple willing to fund billions nothing will evolve in space without the US Government.

Blue Origin gets most of its money from Jeff Bezos as more of a hobby than anything else. I'll let you look up his name elsewhere to see if he can afford a personal space program or not.

The commercial crew program is the first time that Blue Origin has even tried to go after a government funded project of any kind, and in the reviews I saw where they were selected, the NASA review committee seemed to have been quite impressed with not just the proposal but the kinds of things that Blue Origin has done alre

Blue Origin doesn't seem to have a credible roadmap for what they are doing in strategic terms. That is the problem.

Blue Origin doesn't discuss much of anything to anybody. As to if they have a roadmap or a strategic plan, I have no idea if they do or don't. If you know something I don't, I'd love to know how you found out about their lack of a plan.

Jeff Bezos runs the company like a skunkworks and the employees of the company are famously tight lipped about almost anything the company is doing. Far more is known about more esoteric things the company is doing like retrieving the original F1 engines used for the Apoll

Again I ask how you know so much about what Blue Origin isn't doing? I can name a few things they are doing, but due to the fact they are so tight lipped it is hard to say what they aren't doing because you can't prove a negative action.

In the case of SpaceX, you would know what they are not doing because if there was anything they were doing it would have been discussed a long time ago. It is thus easy to say that SpaceX isn't building inflatable orbital habitats because if they were it would be somethin

I have to disagree with you on SSTO being nonsense - only a small percentage of the cost of an orbital launch is the unavoidable fuel costs, much of the rest is in ground control and and the fact that we're basically throwing away everything except for the orbital capsule with every launch. That made great sense during the cold war when the space program was basically PR campaign piggybacking on ICBM technology to reach orbit - and an ICBM is pretty much by definition a single-shot vehicle and requires gro

New Sheperd in all regards hits me as pure naivete. For example, using HTP as an oxidizer. I'm well familiar with the logic here. "Oh, sure, it's got less ISP than LOX, but it's SIMPLER! And ISP isn't everything! We'll go simple and cheap, and get a simple, cheap craft!"

And that logic is wrong.

First off, the lesser issue: ISP may not be everything, but it's huge. The scaling factor for having bad ISP is pretty massive, and your other costs will add up quickly as your craft balloons, everything from your transport costs to your launch liability. People who just discount it like that do a big disservice to themselves.

But the bigger issue: HTP is *not* simpler than LOX. It's a giant pain in the arse. It's explosive, which requires that you have sterile, defect-free tanks and systems with very specific materials requirements and purity constantly maintained. Its explosivity can be greatly reduced by the presence of stabilizers, but therein lies the other problem: the more stable you make it, the less reactive it becomes, and if you're using any sort of catalyst pack (which themselves are full of problems), you tend to clog it. Peroxide vapors from even stabilized HTP are explosive. Stored HTP can become less stable over time, and leaks can be catastrophic (as many people, perhaps most famously in recent years the crew of the Kursk, have learned). Heat can set it off. It's difficult and dangerous to concentrate in terms of oxidizer production. It's illegal to ship in tanker trucks due to its hazardous nature. Etc.

People think about household H2O2 solutions and just picture a more powerful version of that. That is not what HTP is like. The Germans and later the US went with HTP a lot early in their rocketry programs. The fact that its usage became greatly curtailed over time should speak volumes.

Basically, HTP is just reinventing a bad wheel. There's one little explored fuel combination that I'd like to see more focus on, personally: LOX/Propane. Propane is of course widely available, cheap, and easy to transport. It's higher ISP than RP1 (LOX/RP1 being a common propellant combination), but the downside when you first look at it in a table is it's much lower density. BUT, at the same temperature as your LOX - aka, they can share a common bulkhead without insulative separation, reducing system mass -- it's actually quite dense. LOX/Propane is also easier to vaporize and ignite.

Interesting points, I'll admit it's been a long time since I paid much attention to the details of launch systems, too many other interesting fields to keep track of. It does sound like HTP might prove to be an... interesting choice of oxidant, especially for a reusable vehicle where systems will inevitably develop stress flaws

One observation about propane though - unless the Propane has a notably lower total volume than the LOX it would seem a shared bulkhead will significantly *increase* the amount of i

The largest current problem the HTP is simply getting permission from the Department of Homeland Security to even let you ship it at all, where refineries which make the stuff generally won't ship to you unless you are already using it in large industrial scale quantities. That really stinks if you are using for R&D purposes or something like a small start-up company.

Armadillo Aerospace spent a whole bunch of effort on the stuff, and John Carmack even sent out a general request on several mailing lists

Ah, SSTOs... It's not that the concept is wrong. It's not even that it's impossible with current fuels and materials. The problem is that it's so *close* to impossible that the difficulty of creating such a craft inevitably leads to big complications.

I'd like to point out that Space X did first prove they're capable of real life feats with Musk's own money. Yes the latest developments and the docking with ISS has been co-funded (or mostly funded) by NASA and they'll pay them more for additional launches, but they're getting a real deal out of it as SpaceX is doing it way cheaper than any alternative and they actually deliver already today, not far fetched promises.

You forget the alternative. If the public funds the development of new rocket systems by NASA and keeps using them at a cost of 5x that of the private company, then after N launches the total cost for the public is higher than had they developed it in cooperation with a private enterprise that then operates the technology under contracts at a much lower cost. As an example, Falcon 9 of Space X has lift capacity of 10 tons for a cost of $56M. The Delta-IV rocket had 22 tons and $300M so the cost per kg is 3x higher. The Ariane 5 rocket by ESA has 21 ton lift to LEO and cost of $200M. The Atlas V (earlier one) had lift on 9t at a cost of $125M.

Now if Space X can pull off Falcon Heavy (the first launch is planned already in 2013) then the planned cost of 53t to LEO is $80-125M. That gives it a per kg cost of 5.8x less than Delta-IV, 4x less than Ariane 5 etc. And that's assuming the high end of the price range. It's also a rocket that can deliver cargo to trans-lunar-orbit or even to Mars (14t to Mars, 16t to trans lunar). Why the hell would we need an SLS with 50-130t capacity with an outrageous price tag when we can just launch two Falcon 9 heavy's for the same capacity and probably less than the equivalent launch cost and if need be assemble the final inter-plantery spacecraft in orbit...

Oh forgot to add. Space X took the risk on themselves when the did the Falcon 1 and it failed 3x in row. They bet the company on the 4th launch and it worked and have been delivering cargo to LEO and now to ISS since. The Falcon 9 works (it has had 3/3 successes) and Falcon Heavy is basically re-using a lot of the Falcon 9 material so it's likely they'll make it work too. The maiden flight of SLS is planned in 2017 while I'd assume the Falcon Heavy or it's successor might easily be providing the service in

I think a lot of this is indeed coming from the fact that SpaceX is operating like a startup. They also have claimed a lot of the cost reduction comes from the fact that they manufacture every single component themselves in their own factory where the raw materials come in from one door and spaceships/rockets come out the other. They also re-use a lot of the tooling etc because of the design (Falcon 9 is basically 9x Falcon 1 and Falcon Heavy is basically 3x Falcon 9 with inter-exchange of fuel). Due to the

Damn hit submit and then remembered your other parts of the question. With regard to safety and redundancy it's actually in favor of SpaceX. As an example from Falcon Heavy wiki: "The structural safety margins are 40% above flight loads, higher than the 25% margins of other rockets.[10]". They've designed the whole things from ground up for manned flight with extended safety margins so this is not the reason for cheapness...

And with regard to Musk and his motives for the company. Look at the recent 60 minut [youtube.com]

SpaceX is saving money by NOT cutting corners in the design phase. The biggest driver of operational cost in these projects is when something goes wrong in the design process and complicated procedures are added to avoid a total redesign. By getting it right the first time, or having the guts to step back and fix what's wrong instead of slapping on a bandaid, their system will be both cheaper amd more reliable in the long run.

Also, you underestimate how much overhead there is in a 3-tier contracting scheme

This actually legitimizes taking space out of education.Giving the able student one less dream, or asperation for the future. Government science was hard to get into, but the processes were open for transfer to all other, not just one, company.

NOPE! It just takes the astronaut dream from science majors and gives it to the business majors. I can see it now: Come to THE University of Chicago, where ASTRONAUTS are made!